mireazma

Thank you so much. So kind of you. I'll do as you said.

Sorry if I've posted into wrong place but this seemed the most appropriate one. Can you direct me please, to a place where to get help in making a boot menu CD, without installing Windows? I want just the menu in which to select the OS I want, pretty much like PQ Boot. It would be unnecessary since boot.ini does just this, but the very feature I'm interested in is hiding certain partitions at boot time. I'll try to be as clear as I can. This way, I would have 2 independent "virtual" physical drives. I would emulate the following situation: I have 2 physical drives and only one is visible at a time (let's say, because of having one cable only). Each has its own OS and several partitions. I switch between them (unplug the current physical drive and plug in the other). Let's say I have in reality one HDD. I split it into 6 partitions C, D, E, F, G and H. I want C, D and E be visible if I boot the C:\windows and F, G and H hidden. Likewise, F, G and H visible when I boot from F:\windows and the others hidden. Of course, F, G and H would show up after booting, with the letters C, D and E respectively. For this I'd boot from a CD that shows a menu and manages all these. If I didn't use the CD, then no menu would show and the default partitions would show up, loading the default windows. Of course, hidden partitions would still be visible from within PQ Partition Magic or other partition utility. Again I apologize if this isn't the right place. But I couldn't find a closer-related section and you guys, are the right men to know about this.

Thanks both for replying. I didn't remove the core but only IE browser (at least I think i did this). I've uploaded last session.ini LAST_SESSION__205503.04_19.24.46_.INI

I kept "user account pictures" and the IE core (thought maybe this is responsible with displaying the avatar in the up start menu). What else do I have too keep in order to have my avatar displayed? If I select a default photo, it says: "Automation server can't create object". If I browse to my own, it just doesn't show it. Now for a better idea - in Control Panel/User Accounts when I click on Guest to disable it, it says "The specified program is not a Windows or MS-DOS program."... Sometimes in the User Accounts window this appears: "The page could not be displayed" just like when you try to connect to an offline site with IE (I use FF). I forgot to mention (it seemed irrelevant) that I removed IE from "Network" section, as I use Firefox. Could this be the cause?

@ ilko_t : Thanks. I think it's the closest thing to what I want. Not exactly what I want, cuz unfortunately I've already bought a Verbatim and I suppose there's nothing to do without U3... All I know about boot sectors, formats, allocation units and alike, is what they are, not the inner mechanisms. In my logic I'm just wondering: aren't the same elements (mbr/boot sector...) present in all media (hdd,flash,cd-rom)? Probably the precise location differs on each media. Plus I'm not constrained to BIOS detection. @ Maxfutur : I wanted just the ISO on the stick. Sorry, man but my guess is that it ain't worth it to run the windows from the stick, because of the speed; imo it's like having half the ram... Can't remember now the speed, but a HDD has ~150 MB/sec read/write speed, whereas a flash can get to ~7 MB/sec read and ~5 MB/sec write; better buy a class 6 SDHC (~20 read, ~16 write). The values are very approximated and they vary from brand/model to another. The idea is nice, though. Muchas gracias Thanks to Jaclaz (and of course, Wimb_2) I have the windowsXp on my Eee Pc via USB_Multiboot_10. It's not too intuitive (you must know a little stuff) but it gets the job done. It leaves an entry in the boot.ini after xp install, but it's ok.

Ok. So, it's not possible to put an iso on usb... There are 2 ways, from what I see: 1. GUI WinSetupFromUSB 2. multiboot_10 1. No usb drive detected... (verbatim 4 GB) I've done it eventually with multiboot. I've tried FlashBoot and other stuff to write the goddamn iso to a flash... Apparently all of them can only handle floppy or isolinux-based images; beyond me. Man, I've seen you're mod at cd-forum, I've read some posts. You know very much about boot sectors and all. If you don't know a tool that can do the magic, it means there isn't one. But at the same time my mind refuses to accept that noone can stuff an iso into a usb flash. It's unconceiveble!

I've made a bootable image with nLite to use it on my eee but as you may know, the laptop hasn't an optical drive, thus I can only use usb sticks. I've searched for methods to install xp via usb sticks and the I got as far as I must copy the i386 on the hdd first and then install from there. It doesn't look too neat, as I have to install xp on the same partition. One simple nice and clean solution would be to "burn" the iso on the stick. I tried physdiskwrite-0.5.1 that they say it writes an image on a stick but whenever I write an iso Windows doesn't recognize the format and asks if I want to format the stick. I'm not much of a boot freak and my knowledge ends at slimming the windows with nLite. I've also found usb_multiboot_10; from what I've understood, you have to copy i386 (maybe?) to the stick? what about the other files in the iso? So, which is the way as close as possible to having a usb image write capability tool? I think nLite could've had an option - make bootable usb - along with write image on hdd. After all, most users want lite windows to use on low-end pc's. Now, if I had money for a decent laptop with optical drive and all, I wouldn't care for the hdd size, would I?